“When they sent me on my way, I was grateful,” Terry admits with the faintest shudder to the one local brave enough to help him, court clerk Summer McBride (AnnaSophia Robb). “My whole life was back ahead of me. I even heard Mike telling me it was okay.”
Of course, the reality was that he didn’t have the blessing from a beloved, deceased family member. He wasn’t even bribed. Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johns0n) just gave him back a fraction of his own money.
“The chief didn’t give me an out, I gave him one,” Terry finally admits to himself. “And that wasn’t Mike’s voice, that was mine. This shit’s far from okay, and these cops might end up on top. I’m not pretending here, but they sure as shit don’t get any more outs. And Mike, I hope he’s in a better place, but I don’t know enough about the afterlife to trust in it. So while I’m here, and he’s not, I gotta haunt these motherfuckers myself.”
This is a fantastic movie star line, written for maximum impact by Sauliner, and carefully drawn out by Pierre like a mic drop at the end of a killer set. An eloquent, dopamine-inducing way to essentially say “let’s make these pigs hurt,” it’s a line of dialogue that, like the entire role, seems tailor-made to transform a performer into a name. Reminiscent of Russell Crowe intoning, “Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife,” in Gladiator, or Samuel L. Jackson promising to “strike down with great vengeance and furious anger” in Pulp Fiction, this is movie-writing engineered to make you remember a character and performance.
Which is all the more impressive when you consider that it was not written for Pierre. Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about Rebel Ridge is how good it is despite gaining a lot of dubious press after actor John Boygea exited the movie mid-production in 2021. The reasons for Boyega’s departure remain a mystery, however in retrospect it brings to mind moments like Hugh Jackman stepping in at the last minute to play Wolverine in X-Men (2000), or Viggo Mortensen joining The Lord of the Rings trilogy mid-shoot after another actor was let go from the production.
Those turned out to be star-making roles for Jackman and Mortensen, and so it may yet prove to be for Pierre. Rebel Ridge is unto itself the type of movie that would be considered a star vehicle in another generation. I’ve already mentioned one Clint Eastwood Western that played with the motif of the lone gunman punishing a corrupt community, and it’s a setup he returned to long after he parted ways with Sergio Leone. Both High Plains Drifter (1973) and Unforgiven (1992) leaned into the concept, and plenty of other films updated it to the modern world with a veneer of Post-Vietnam cynicism: movies like Rolling Thunder (1977) and one of Sylvester Stallone’s calling cards, First Blood (1982), which introduced John Rambo as a veteran suffering from heavy PTSD when some cracker cops decide to pick on the wrong loner.